Mountain of the Watchful Heart

Australian artist Jo Bertini at Blumenschein

JO BERTINI IS AN AWARD-WINNING, established Australian artist. She is a painter, art educator, lecturer and writer, known internationally for her paintings and drawings of desert landscapes, people and animals. Her work is the focus of the publication “Fieldwork – Jo Bertini,” celebrating her long and intimate engagement with the Australian deserts. She continues to focus her artistic interests on desert people and places, painting and working in some of the most remote and inaccessible desert regions of the world.

For 10 years, Bertini worked as the first female Expedition Artist on scientific and ecological survey expeditions into the most remote and inaccessible desert regions of Australia. Her international exhibition record is extensive and her art is in numerous private and public collections, including museums and institutions.

I was struck by Bertini’s work when it was first sent to me, but an introduction made over the phone by our mutual friend, Jonathan Warm Day Coming, presented an opportunity to pose a few questions.

You are showing at the Blumenschein, please tell our readers a little about the show.

The high desert lands of Taos and the American Southwest have long attracted indigenous peoples, explorers, pilgrims and artists. The historical version of deserts as harsh, inhospitable places to be conquered or exploited is well-chronicled in the Western canon. Yet, there is another mostly underrepresented version which interests me. There is a gentle benevolence to these lands, a feminine quality and an atmosphere of acceptance. There is a peacefulness and serenity in their beauty, a sense of openness and nurturing that lives in the wildness here.

My works contribute a contemporary feminine perspective to the historical archive where artists have long adopted a reverent eye in their interpretations of these deserts. At once familiar, yet strange to me, the high desert landscapes and people of Northern New Mexico continue to attract the ‘artist eye,’ offering alternative inspirations, not only beautiful and unique to the world, which can contribute to a deeper understanding of global desert environments.

You are from Australia; Sydney, in fact — what brings a big city (coastal) girl to the high desert of New Mexico?

Sydney has been a base for me but I have been very fortunate to be recognized for the work that I have done over decades in the deserts and with the indigenous peoples of Australia and have subsequently been invited to work in other deserts of the world and to exhibit my paintings internationally. Creative isolation is very important to me, and I have spent many decades living and working in the most remote isolated desert regions of the world. In 2015, I was invited to Santa Fe to do an artist residency, and given access to work with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the School for Advanced Research (SAR). I was so fortunate to be included on a scientific research expedition to Chaco Canyon with some anthropologists, botanists and archaeologists from SAR. My time in New Mexico made a big impression on me and I found so much of the landscapes and cultural material and people and place so familiar yet also so different. I was captivated and, as many artists before me, became completely ‘enchanted’ by this place.

Tell us a bit about your process — what inspires you and what the evolution of inception to canvas looks like.

It’s all about passion and curiosity. I am a traditionally trained painter and believe in the importance of the

personal artistic experience. Initially, field work and making studies from life is fundamental to my process in order to develop a deeper understanding and learn my subject well before I attempt any resolution of my own ideas or perspective. Often, I will start a painting having done all my studies with a particular intention and then the painting itself leads me in a completely different direction. It’s not that different

from science…the vanguard push on the possibilities being discovered or dreamed up in the field or lab. Painting for me is about grappling with my own knowledge and experiences.

As many female artists, I have also always been concerned with the ongoing objectification of women throughout art history and culture. I’m interested in re-envisioning the representation of the female through

portraits and studies of women desert dwellers and their lives. Sometimes the female figures I paint are hybrids of existing prejudices and often bear multiple cultural references indicative of different ethnicities, which is really how I find the contemporary world, particularly in many remote desert communities where people are often attracted to other ways of living and reflect an attempt to bridge the past and present.

Moments of poetry are vital in my paintings. To seize those particular glimpses of magic that naturally occur in the world or that we somehow inuit or imagine; where a red tailed hawk suddenly swoops down through the river canyon at sunset, so low you can see every tail feather and seemingly oblivious of my presence. Artistically,

you stop thinking to yourself, you stop hearing yourself, become transparent, synonymous with the landscape. There is an Australian aboriginal saying ‘the desert right sizes you.’ Desert landscapes, for me, have a gravitational pull and, right now, I am particularly beguiled by the American Southwest. My paintings attempt to describe a lifetime of these experiences, moments and memories.

Anything else we should know about Jo Bertini?

My longtime passion and creative inspiration continues to be about desert environments, ecology, science, history and their preservation. I have recently been invited to work in Mongolia and China and am always excited by the diversity and similarities I encounter when introduced to new desert places. All my decades living and working in these deserts of the world have made me acutely aware of the fragile and extremely endangered nature of these precious, underresearched, ecologically rich and biodiverse environments and the crucial importance of their conservation.